


takeda no komoriuta

by sonrisita



Category: Naruto
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, F/F, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Senju Hashirama/Uchiha Madara, Strong Female Characters, Warring States Period (Naruto), also im just now realizing i may not have been clear, asmr i cry louly into ur ear about lesbian mito, im sorry in advance, no cheating happens in this fic, only a little??? for madara reasons, thank u for ur time, there should be more fics for mito........ thats my wife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:20:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25694182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonrisita/pseuds/sonrisita
Summary: Twenty-six truths about Uzumaki Mito.Mito speaks to the tide. It washes over her feet in the early morning and cleans her hands of their blisters. It says her father’s name, and her cousin’s, and her older brother’s.We keep them safe,the Tide says.They are resting well.
Relationships: Implied Senju Touka/Uzumaki Mito, Senju Hashirama & Uzumaki Mito, Senju Hashirama/Uchiha Madara, Senju Tobirama & Uzumaki Mito, Uchiha Madara & Uzumaki Mito, Uzumaki Mito/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 82





	takeda no komoriuta

**Author's Note:**

> > She wants to go as fast as she can  
> Across this village;  
> There in the distance is her mother's house.  
> 
> 
> ⎯ Lullaby of Takeda 

**ONE.**

Mito hates the heat. 

It’s unbecoming of Uzushio’s princess, she assumes, but all the same, it runs her ragged. The summer curls into the hemline of her too-heavy robes and leaves them sticky with sunshine, runs through her hair like sap and leaves it stuck to her face in wisps. When she’s six, the rebellion comes alight: she runs amuck around no Sato with her dress pulled over her head and her curly hair cut boy-short at her ears. When Mother catches her in the East wing and tugs her skirt down, she yanks her by the ear into her arms. “Mito,” she says, already sick, deep in her throat. “You will _behave.”_

Mito says nothing. Mito hates the heat.

**TWO.**

Mito has three best friends, but there’s one she likes best.

Her name is Kieko, and she’s always pouting. She has dark skin and even darker eyes, with a smile that drinks up the sunshine and makes it look sweet. 

When Mito is seven, Keiko teaches her to braid her hair, short and scraggly as it is. She folds the unkept edges like origami and makes them look beautiful. Mito has always been beautiful -- honorable and talented and bright -- but Keiko says it and suddenly, it seems new. 

When Mito is nine, Keiko’s father dies. The funeral is outside of Uzushio, but Mito thinks of Keiko until she falls asleep. Maybe even after that. When she sees her next, she ties a long band of yellow and red cloth around Keiko’s updo and splits her mother’s last dumplings in half to share. Keiko sits with her until the sun goes down. Maybe even after that.

When Mito is twelve, Keiko shows her how to dance her clan’s festival box-step: it’s easy enough, and Mito is nothing if not a fast learner. She doesn’t step on Keiko’s feet, but she does bump her shoulders once or twice, giggling through berry stained teeth in the early summer shade. She doesn’t step on Keiko’s feet, but she does kiss the corner of her mouth; once, and then twice, and then Keiko laughs and says her smile is like sugar.

**THREE.**

Mito speaks to the tide. 

It washes over her feet in the early morning and cleans her hands of their blisters. It says her father’s name, and her cousin’s, and her older brother’s.  _ We keep them safe,  _ the Tide says.  _ They are resting well. _

**FOUR.**

Mito seals a rabbit into a scroll for the first time when she’s ten.

Mother stares from overhead as the little thing scrambles between Mito’s inked handiwork, dissolves into a sea of light as it falls feet first into the space between her kanji. “Your father would be proud,” Mother says. Mito smiles for the rest of the day.

**FIVE.**

When Mito is thirteen, Keiko’s clan holds a harvest festival a few miles North; it’s one day round-trip and Mito takes it without telling her mother, holding a pouch of blossoms in her skirt along the way.

She braids them into Keiko’s hair the way she taught her; origami wings over every stem and every petal, and soon Keiko is a wildflower in the angry blaze of her clan’s wind, radiant and brave beneath a crown of the forest. Mito has only ever seen the forests that outline Uzushio. Keiko shows her the redwoods that stretch up toward the stars and slit the sky clean through. 

They dance Keiko’s box-step and steal pastries. Mito licks the jam off her thumbs and laughs until her ribs are sore.

**SIX.**

Mother dies two weeks before the Spring.

Mito is fifteen and on fire with the weight of it, but still: she smiles politely when she’s offered condolences and sips tea when it’s ushered into her hands. She nods, shoulders squared and noble, as her best friends bow at her feet like well-trained hounds. 

She learns to swallow being called  _ sama  _ the same way she learns not to swallow peach-pits once she’s cleaned them of meat. She learns to date documents and sign treaties, to tend to the children even though they’re hardly much younger than she is, and she learns to dance Keiko’s box-step with a new face from a few miles North, offering his hand in marriage for a steady line of wind guarding Uzushio’s borders. He holds a kunai to her back as they glide across the dancefloor. When she says no, it is with his blood in her mouth, and her teeth a blade against the sharp line of his throat.

The fox inside her licks it’s claws while she cleans her robes. Keiko stops visiting after that.

**SEVEN.**

A month later, the wind users from a few miles North storm Uzushio. Uzushio cuts them down without a second thought. 

It is a necessary precaution. That’s what she tells herself, at least. 

**EIGHT.**

The Tide wipes her tears. It drowns Keiko’s name in it’s salt. 

Mito doesn’t wear braids for a while after that.

**NINE.**

Kurama leaves a cluster of bruises beneath both of Mito’s wandering eyes. She challenges him to a fight. “My body is the prize,” she says. He tells her she won’t be able to draw blood. 

She buries one hand in the coarse fur of his neck and slams her nails through his skin, like bark. His blood doesn’t wash away, but her cage works well enough to hide her fangs. Kurama settles in his boil and Mito learns to carry him in the hollow of her chest, less like a monster and more like a friend.

**TEN.**

Hashirama Senju finds Uzushio. This is remarkable, because nobody should be able to find Uzushio. She asks him what he wants and he says, unflinchingly, “Peace.”

She thinks of Keiko. She has her answer.

**ELEVEN.**

She meets Madara only once before the wedding.

His eyes are sharp and red and awake although he looks tired to his bones, sick with the weight of war and aching with the heat of his fire. She wonders if he feels the same as she does; if the heat that clings beneath his ribs like a pyre is anything like the blood under Mito’s nails. 

He stares at her as she circles the room of councilmen, shaking hands and exchanging smiles. His gaze is unforgiving. 

**TWELVE.**

Sometimes the engagement ring feels all too heavy on her finger.

She doesn’t break it and she doesn’t take it off, no matter what her instincts tell her. Instead, she settles on a box of chiseled porcelain teaware. She hurls each teacup against the far wall of her new bedroom just to hear the shatter; it sounds enough like the ocean that she learns to make her peace.

**THIRTEEN.**

Hashirama’s window is home to a few falcons a day, usually at odd hours of the night or at the early bridge of dawn. “Oh, it’s only Madara,” he tells her. She sips her tea from the wine glasses they’ve resorted to after the sudden disappearance of his grandmother’s tea set.

“This Madara,” she begins. “He’s a colleague of yours?”

Hashirama blinks up at her as he blows the steam from his glass. “A friend, actually.”

She tilts her head. “Only a friend?”

Hashirama startles. “Of course.”

She takes another sip. He must think he’s a good liar. 

**FOURTEEN.**

She beats Toka in a game of Shogi. She doesn’t say,  _ I’ve never played before.  _ She only says,  _ thank you for teaching me.  _

Toka stares long and hard at her at Mito’s mouth for a few moments before her eyes fall to her stolen bishop. “It’s been my pleasure, Lady Mito,” she says.

**FIFTEEN.**

The night of the reception, she and Madara are drinking together on the edge of the mountainside. It’s by chance, more than anything, that she finds him here, swept away by the night and drowning in his guilt. She feels something in her chest steady when he looks up to greet her, the matted fur of Kurama’s tail standing on end. She sits beside him on the dirt and feels it smear the back of her dress. 

“Congratulations,” he says.

“Thank you,” she nods.

They drink.

She asks before she can stop herself. “Do you love him?” 

Madara goes very still for a very long moment. Mito is not afraid of him. He hurls his glass off the edge of the cliffside and it shatters on the dusty streets beneath their feet.

“Unconditionally.”

Madara buries his face in his hands as she watches the sky overtake his face. She nods carefully and takes one last sip of her sake before winding her arm back and throwing her glass as far as the sky will carry it. Her dress tears open at the sleeve. __

_ “Kami,” _ she curses. “How much do you suppose he paid for this thing? It wears like a _ python.”  _ Madara laughs into his hands. Mito nudges his arm.

They talk for a few hours after that; the lights and the music still loud in the city below, igniting the wooden houses in streaks of yellow and bronze. She stands him up and teaches him Keiko’s box-step along the edge of the cliffside, her head on his shoulder and the stars melting over them. It’s the least she can offer him.

He tucks a curl of his own behind his ear with one gloved hand, and comes up to hold her by her waist.

“You know, Madara,” she says, gently. “I think the ocean would love you.”

**SIXTEEN.**

Konohagakure is a tinderbox. Hashirama makes sure of this, with his mokuton sprouting twig houses left and right.

Mito is twenty-two, dangling her legs over the edge of it. She’ll be twenty-three before the year is up. “You know,” she says to him, one morning in the spring. “This place would burn down in an instant if you’d let it.”

He splays his hands down on the countertop. “That’s why I won’t let it,” he says to her.

She’s long since made peace with the wedding. Long since made peace with the ring on her finger and her eldest cousin’s new reign on Uzushio. She supposes she’s made peace with all of it, actually, and she’s finally ready to put it all to bed. She’ll be kept. She’ll live in the spring, in Hashirama’s flowers, in the morning sun of Konohagakure that dries the blood from the creases of her palms and the curls that hang down to guard her eyes. She’ll live with her fox as her shadow, and Hashirama’s palm on the seal. She’ll live with Madara’s heart between her teeth. She’ll live with the truth, and the pain of it all, as she always has.

But, still. Mito hates the heat. And Konohagakure is never cold.

**SEVENTEEN.**

Kurama had been Mother’s angry pet before he had been Mito’s. She remembers the twinge of red in those eyes during nights when the Tide was especially loud, howling Father’s name through the open windows of their living room. Mother would simply draw the curtains and ball her fists, nails long and ragged and cutting through her palms. Mother would perform her katas. Mother would put the kettle on. Mother would write until the orange glow of her skin died back to pink and the Tide fell to the shore, and the world was asleep again.

Mito tells herself these are things she can do. And so, she does all of them.

**EIGHTEEN.**

Her and Hashirama drink together one night at the end of autumn. His mokuton is so strong that the house is hardly ever cold, but tonight he’s had enough of whatever fire-wine they’ve dug up to leave the floor feeling icy, bathing in the cusp of winter. He buries his face in his arms laughing and she strokes his back.

“I’m sorry, you know,” he smarts, suddenly, squinting baldly at the last of his drink. “I really do love him.” His eyes widen, as though he’s surprised by the words, and the brown in them darkens as he burrows back down into his sleeves. 

Mito only laughs. “I know, Hashirama,” she says. “I know.”

**NINETEEN.**

Things are easier after that. He doesn’t kiss her in the mornings and she doesn’t stand waiting to be kissed. He doesn’t call her  _ darling _ unless he means to tease her, and she forgets to say  _ anata  _ entirely. He doesn’t bother with the pleasantries of married-life, and she’s more than happy to oblige him. 

She does buy a new tea set for him, though. He smiles and pretends not to know what happened to the last one.

**TWENTY.**

It is a harsh and devastating thing when finally Madara leaves, more so because Mito knew he would. 

The wind howls and the sky darkens and she stares out from between her green curtains as the world grows much, much wider, his chakra a dangerous flash of red over the land she does not recognize. Hashirama notices this, too -- perhaps by virtue of Tobirama, or of his own sensory abilities, though Mito isn’t quite sure of what they are. Regardless of any of it, he’s clad in his armor and flushed red in the face as he makes for the door.

“Hashirama,” she says, and stands to follow him. Her robes drag along the carpet. “He doesn’t have to die.”

Hashirama is tense under her hands. “Believe me, Mito,” he whispers, as though he’s marching to his own death, himself. “I don’t want him to.”

**TWENTY-ONE.**

It is Mito who finds Tobirama that same night. He’s halfway out the door once she’s made it to his house, hand raised and poised to knock. He looks her up and down very quickly before he says, “Yes, I know,” and takes her hand. They run together, and he holds her robes as she steps barefoot over streams and side steps tree branches.

When they find Hashirama, it is near daybreak, and with three ANBU alongside them. Madara lays still and stiff in Hashirama’s arms. Tobirama kneels beside him and braces a hand on the back of his neck as one of the ANBU carefully slides Madara’s body away. 

“Anija,” Tobirama says. His voice is gentle. “Anija.” 

Hashirama says nothing. He only shakes.

Tobirama pillows Hashirama’s head in his lap and strokes his hair through the silence, kissing his forehead and patting his chest as he stares out at the water.

The three of them sit quietly on the riverbank as the sun rises. The smell, Mito thinks, may be the worst part.

**TWENTY-TWO.**

Hashirama’s mourning turns the house sour. His door is tightly shut and at breakfast, if he shows his face, it is only to be miserable in the company of his wife and brother. His eyes stay slanted, always, as though he’s half confused and half terrified. He rereads Madara’s letters and tends to Madara’s falcons, and he does not cry. 

She finds him, some mornings, tucked under his quilts -- and he stays that way until the sun falls. On these nights Tobirama hauls him from his room and says, very gently, “We’ll go slow. Only your hair.” He sits on his knees beside Hashirama in the bathroom, pouring water over his scalp and picking half grown moss and jenny from behind his ears. Hashirama does not speak for many days.

Mito brings him tea and comes back hours later to collect it, cold, still sitting beside him. She talks to him, too, the same way Tobirama tries to. Sits gently at the edge of his cot and strokes her hand up and down his back as though he’s a sick child. Hashirama only stares at the garden from his window.

One night, he says, “Mito.”

Mito startles, and her hand stops at the center of his back. “Yes, Hashirama?”

“Look,” he tells her. He sounds like he might just die laughing. “My grief has killed the camellias.”

The winter blows in and curls beneath Konoha’s feet. Mito realizes, for the first time, she may actually hate the cold.

**TWENTY-THREE.**

She senses him alive one morning, far from the border. He is sick and ill, but breathing. She glances at Hashirama, his eyes solemn and bruised, and then to Tobirama, whose gaze flickers to meet her’s just as fast. They share a long look.

In the end, they say nothing about it. 

It is a necessary precaution. That’s what she tells herself, at least.

**TWENTY-FOUR.**

She visits Uzushio for a few weeks in the satin warmth of her twenty-third June. The fruit trees swing low to bid her a good morning, and the border stretches its arms to welcome its princess home. 

The city moves differently, now. Perhaps only because she isn’t at the center of it.

She goes to see the Tide that night. She does not find her name in the salt, but she thought she might check anyway.

**TWENTY-FIVE.**

Many years later, when she is alone and quiet and gentle around the edges, they bring her Kushina.

The girl spends the better part of the day pacing around Mito’s bedroom. She nervously caps and uncaps lipstick, lifts perfume to smell. At the edge of Mito’s bed, she finds a thick bough of scrolls wrapped tightly around Mito’s fan, and plays with the worn edges until something gives, and she starts to cry.

Mito leans toward her slowly, tired and wilted and sick. Brushing her hand against Kushina’s wet face, she draws the girl’s forehead to her own. “Hush, now,” Mito whispers. “You have nothing to be afraid of.”

The girl hiccups wetly. Her tightly coiled red hair falls around her like a curtain, and she sniffles loudly until the tears subside. “Lady Mito, I’m not afraid,” she huffs. Her green eyes open, nose to nose with the woman she will one day become. 

“Well, then?” Mito asks, and combs out the curls at the nape of the girl’s neck. “What’s all this fuss?”

Kushina draws away, considering this. Through puffy eyes and a careful sigh, she decides. “I guess . . . I guess I’m just trying to be brave.”

Mito kisses her forehead before she goes. There’s a feeling between her ribs that she remembers from Keiko’s smile; words finally falling into place as her lungs grow tired and slow

There is hope. In the small of her back and the ridge of her neck, the meat of her heart and every vertebrae. There is hope here and here and here, and even some  _ there.  _ It kisses her gently as her eyes fall to close.

**TWENTY-SIX.**

When Mito goes, the Tide welcomes her home. 

**Author's Note:**

> hi!!!!!!!!!!!!! i wrote this in like two hours so constructive criticism is v welcome !!! or just leave a comment if u wanna make me smile :)) i hope u enjoyed & that u have a wonderful day !!!


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